Yeah, personally I take them as speculations at this point, but I won't completely dismiss them either. Of course laptop will never completely replace a tower, but actually for a lot of tasks, aside from heavy-duty video editing ,meaning full-length tv shows and feature films for instance, a good laptop or even an iMac can get most things done rather well. Even our uni's Mac based video edit actually runs on an iMac instead of a MacPro. Obviously it is a bit slow on rendering, but editing video pieces of say 5 to 30 minutes it is probably more than adequate for the job.

Thom Hogan, professional photographer, does NOT like the new SD card feature in the Macbook Pro.

I ran across 2 people in the last week that use a verizon wireless express card in their MBP. The solution now will need to be a USB adapter for the express card, if they work on Macs, and not as clean of a solution either. No way to expand the 15" MBP now and like Thom says the 17" is too big for some to want to carry around.

Here in Finland all our telecom operators offer wireless internet connection (3G) on a USB stick or dongle. Maybe Verizon offers similar solutions stateside? I mean most in the market here are made in China by Huawei.

Don't know how well that would with a USB hub though, to save those few precious connectors, as it draws the power from the USB connection. Personally I don't have one, but that is the solution for online access for my mom and grandparents and for their needs it's very adequate.

One other solution could be using a cell phone as a modem either via USB cable or bluetooth, which unfortunately drains the phone battery quite fast.

My old work Dell was a USB wireless - to me express card wireless is sorta old tech ?

Why do you say old tech? They are much faster than USB. Typical express speeds are 2.5 Gbit/s, where USB is 480 Mbit/s. The standard was just introduced in 2003 and products just started coming out with it and for it in 2006. The link below is pretty informative.

The laptop add-on card ports have evolved like the tower's PCI slots. It usd to be CardBus on laptops, but it's currently PCI Express like in towers. Just because the plug in card concept has been around awhile doesn't mean it's old technology.

A wireless express card is just a much cleaner solution IMO. The speed doesn't matter for Internet of course, but the card is almost flush to the case, no USB connector to possibly break and no long device sticking out, the express slot is 3 inches into the machine, much more solid. You can put the machine into a case without having to remove the card, more convenient, pull the laptop out of the bag and go. You don't use a USB port (only 2 on the MBP) or its resources and power.

I have an eSATA expresscard with a 1Tb external drive on it. Backups etc. are obscenely fast. I'd be very sorry to lose that capability - but it'll be years before I can afford to upgrade, and by then I hope all laptops have an eSATA socket on them .

I had a USB Clear Wire so called broadband was okay for internet but when it came to youTube you can forget that it just won't play or maybe was my airport/ Honolulu location ?

It seems ClearWire is a broadband internet provider that uses cell towers to transmit. On a good day the consumer level speed is about 700 Kbps, business level is 2000 Kbps, as compared to for example my cable that's 8000 Kbps. If you had the 700 that would explain slow youtube stuff.

Edit - The ClearWire is all USB. I just like the solution where 90% of the device is inside of the machine rather than outside.

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